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Young woman dares Maasai culture with big, bold dreams

One year after the Toronto Star shared the improbable tale of a stubborn farmer’s daughter who defied her arranged marriage to seize an education, Teriano Lesancha has become an economic powerhouse.

Ryerson grad Teriano Lesancha has returned to her rural village in Kenya for a month, along with several other students, to launch half a dozen new projects to help improve life there. One of her plans is to set up a micro-business in beading. She's wearing some of her beading. (Colin McConnell / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

Lesancha Saidimu, left, his daughter Teriano Lesancha and Mama Teriano, right, are shown at Ryerson University where Teriano graduated last month with a degree in social work. From Kenya, Teriano defied plans for an arranged marriage in order to get an education in Canada. (CARLOS OSORIO / TORONTO STAR) | Order this photo

Budding impresario Teriano Lesancha, second from left, sits with fellow Ryerson students who will travel with her to her Maasai village in Kenya to launch a number of economic projects, from beekeeping to beadmaking co-operatives. From left: George Phu, Teriano Lesancha, Eva Parrell, Albetel Abera, Heather Norris, Tracy Leparulo, Sneha Mata (back), Tyler Baird and Simone Tissenbaum. (Carlos Osorio / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

The young Maasai woman who gave a cow to the president of Ryerson has unlocked a stampede of help and innovation for her village back in Kenya. She’s drawn an unlikely mash-up of support, from senior fashion students to an Orangeville beekeeper, from Bob Marley’s granddaughter to the head of Google Ideas and more.

One year after the Star shared the improbable tale of a stubborn farmer’s daughter who defied her arranged marriage to seize an education, Teriano Lesancha has become an economic powerhouse for this quiet stretch of the Great Rift Valley. With only a bachelor’s degree and a growing crew of spellbound volunteers, the 28-year-old dynamo has launched an education foundation in her once illiterate village that has sent 50 teens to high school this year alone.

Too, she has started a Maasai beadwork collective — 100 women so far, including her mother — to seek a fair price for their signature art, some of which Teriano wore when she crossed the Ryerson stage last June to collect her bachelor’s degree in social work. They plan to design a little tag for each item with the story of the woman who made it. “It’s Maasai branding,” she says, “and it will make every woman her own CEO.”

The girl who is determined to run for politics one day back home has already laid the groundwork for a women’s health centre for her village, a cybercafe and beekeeping operation, all to be self-sustaining within three years.

And she left Thursday for a month in Kenya again with even more projects she believes will enrich the standard of living without threatening her beloved Maasai culture. Two Ryerson fashion students are on the trip to explore how to tweak colourful Maasai styles to western tastes for a future global fashion line.

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“This is what educated women do, and it changes the world,” declared the girl whose once skeptical father has become a convert to the value of formal schooling. Not only did he give Ryerson President Sheldon Levy a cow last year to thank the university for supporting his daughter’s education, but he has given Teriano a plot of land for her very own.

“Maasai women traditionally don’t own land,” she crowed. “This is huge.” She plans to use it for a cyber cafe, or maybe a year-round volunteer village; right now Canadian Tire has donated 20 tents.

But something else has happened back home. Teriano has become a secret hero for some of the young girls in the village who send her private notes when she goes home — in Swahili, a language few parents can read — pleading for help to escape forced marriages to older men, many of whom have other wives.

“When I go home, I’m overwhelmed. Everyone comes to me as if I have all the solutions — our home was so packed on my last trip home we had to slaughter a goat to feed everyone,” she recalled. “This is where my social work degree helps me. I tell them, I know the solution is within you.”

Once pledged to be married at 13 to an older man, the ambitious A-student fought her father every step of the way and finally, with her mother’s help, persuaded him to scrap the marriage, forego the dowry of five cows and send her to high school, college, then university in faraway Canada. Each time, he had to pay her tuition by selling more cows.

She has repaid the debt with interest; more cows — 10 to start, double what the dowry would have been. Her father has seen how her investments in new houses and scholarships have enriched daily lives.

Yet despite her example, some local girls are still forbidden to go to high school, which costs about $400 a year, the price of a cow. One girl who wants to study public health in Nairobi instead of getting married begged Teriano last fall to talk her father into cancelling the wedding. She couldn’t reach him on the phone from Toronto.

The girl was sent to the marriage — and has since run away.

“I’m losing sleep with worry over this girl,” Teriano said. “She reminds me of myself. This marrying off girls has to stop.”

Girls’ right to an education is at the heart of all her dreams. She set up a local committee to hand out scholarships in her absence, and told them to make sure 60 per cent go to girls.

That’s proving tough.

“It’s economic; you send your daughter to school? You lose cows. You have to sell them to pay tuition and boarding for four years. But you marry off girls? You get cows. It’s a cow economy.”

Even students who start high school often have to quit, if their families run out of money, or drought strikes. Sometimes they go back later, but interrupted schooling makes it hard to get the marks that can win a juicy scholarship for higher learning.

“But ‘my girls’ will never have to leave school,” she brags. “The ones on my scholarships can afford to go to very good schools and won’t have their education interrupted.”

Still, Teriano can’t personally talk every father into sending his daughter to school. So she has booked a meeting this month with District Governor David Nkedianye to urge him to enforce the Kenyan constitution’s ban on forced marriages, even in rural villages. He flew into the pop-up convocation Ryerson staged for her last year in her village of Loodariak, which just happened to be during his election campaign while Kenyan TV cameras were rolling for her graduation.

Now it’s payback time for all that good press, she said.

“I’m going to tell him, ‘You have to put something in the system to protect girls in the rural areas.’ Maybe two days in jail for fathers who force their girls to marry? I’ll tell him, ‘You spoke that day about educating girls; now it’s time for action.”

Teriano was supposed to be concentrating on making money this year for grad school — she’s thinking of public policy and administration at Ryerson. But the job she landed in the “international experiential learning” office of Ryerson’s Ted Rogers School of Business was such a good fit for her ideas, she has been able to combine the job of arranging overseas work for students, with planting the seeds of many of her own dreams.

Her charitable foundation called Supa Maasai (Supa is Hello in the Maasai language) has been accepted as a “startup” at Ryerson’s prestigious Digital Media Zone (DMZ), the “incubator” Prince Charles toured last year, where young innovators woo investors. The foundation has four goals: education for girls, health services for women, economic development and cultural pride.

“She has so many good ideas and she’s so magnetic — every time she turns around people are there, but I honestly don’t know when she gets everything done,” noted Ryerson nursing professor Nancy Walton, who is helping her write a $100,000 grant application for a women’s health centre that might incorporate the area’s first daycare centre so that girls who get pregnant can still go to school.

“She’s a little impatient; I’ve told her she has to move slowly.”

Not likely. Teriano has applied to World Vision for a $1 million grant for women’s education over five years for awareness campaigns on everything from HIV and female circumcision to women’s legal rights.

She keeps generating so many ideas, the university has assigned her a summer student to help keep them all straight.

“This girl — what a crazy, unbelievable story this has become,” says Ryerson President Sheldon Levy, whose donation last summer of 10 cows, and a matching donation from then chancellor Raymond Chang, kick-started her foundation. She now has about $10,000, with 16 more cows grazing to be fattened up and sold in October at double the price she bought them for.

“Her plans will empower the village to leapfrog ahead by a century.”

Levy has become close to Teriano and her family, and continues to take delight in bridging their two worlds. When he and his wife were in the car one day with Teriano, they suggested she call her mother in Kenya and put her on speaker phone, so Levy could speak to her and Teriano could translate.

“My mother loved it! She was amazed she could hear us both — she can’t believe how technology can connect us.” Never mind how her father, who was startled by the concept of television, reacted when she hooked him up to Maasai cousins on Skype.

“My poor Dad! So much new technology!”

The Teriano factor pops up all over Ryerson these days. When Bob Marley’s granddaughter, Donisha Prendergast, enrolled for film studies at Ryerson this fall, Levy got reminiscing with her about the 1979 concert Bob Marley threw at Maple Leaf Gardens.

Before long the two were planning a concert to bring Marleys back to the Gardens, now owned by Ryerson. It will be a fundraiser for Teriano’s foundation, featuring some of the reggae star’s musical grandchildren.

In the meantime, Teriano is back home, where she will bring nine business students — members of Ryerson’s award-winning “Enactus” entrepreneur club — to give financial tips on start-up projects from beekeeping to a solar-powered cyber cafe, for which the club already has lined up 10 donated solar panels.

They just need some way to ship them to Kenya.

“If we had an Internet cafe, the women could have a place where they could work together and have the social interaction of a group,” Teriano suggested. “Right now only two of the women in the beadworking collective are literate — if I text my Mom, my brother has to translate for her — but those women could mentor young girls who can read and write. Who knows, they could use computers to take online orders for their beadwork.”

The business students will do a “needs assessment” to see how they can create a sustainable export business with both beads and honey, said recent graduate Tyler Baird, 33, whose family are beekeepers in Orangeville, Ont. Last year, he was part of an Enactus team that helped another Kenyan village called Dago create a beekeeping farm. They built an apiary and set up four hives.

“Teriano’s village has even more flowers and vegetation — honey production could really create a revenue stream for the village,” said Baird, who is bringing beekeeping suits and a smoker to help set up the hives in Loodariak. “Kenya has to import honey, but that could stop if people were able to produce some of their own.”

One good hive can produce 80 pounds of honey, he said, which can sell for $200 — the annual salary in rural Kenya.

Fellow business grad, Tracy Leparulo, 23, of Richmond Hill, has been to Kenya twice with Enactus to teach financial literacy and is part of Teriano’s delegation to her village.

“It’s amazing how the stars aligned for us to go with her and help people think differently to create wealth. A lot of people in rural Kenya don’t like taking risks, so the economy is almost at a halt.”

Meanwhile, Teriano has planned a fundraising campaign in Kenya (“Buy a cow! Educate a girl!”) and is planning a cultural pride festival in December for which she has asked Maasai gold medallist runner David Rudisha to talk to the local kids.

And the Kenyan farmer’s daughter with the irrepressible giggle has another connection no one knew about. When she was growing up, a Stanford grad student came and did research in the village for three months. Jared Cohen lived with her family; she was his translator. He fell in love with her village and as the years passed and he became a Rhodes scholar and foreign affairs specialist, he would come back to visit the village and chat in Swahili with her mother and go out on the land with her dad.

Jared Cohen now happens to be the head of Google Ideas. Time magazine recently named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He was one of the few foreign policy advisers to the American government under U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that her successor Hillary Clinton kept when she took over.

Last December, Cohen visited the village when Teriano was home and brought his “boss, Eric.” (Eric Schmidt, chair of Google, said to be worth $8 billion.) No one in the village knew who Eric was; they were far too excited about their adopted son Jared, to whom they have given the Maasai nickname Memusi (which means “happy you’re here.”) He also brought folks from Google Kenya, which runs a big incubator in Nairobi, but it was all very informal.

Teriano has his cell number; they Tweet back and forth in Swahili.

Has she asked her old friend for help with, say, a cybercafe?

Horrors!

“No! Not at all — we’re friends,” she laughs. “And we really want do this in the right way, through education and mentorship and having it be driven by the community — the top-down aid approach has failed” she said. “If the community doesn’t come up with the ideas, they won’t use it when the aid workers are gone.”

She returns in September to take a course called Foundations of Management, and continue to work on seeking funding to improve the lives of women and girls.

“People say to me; ‘It’s always about you and your girls’ — but I can’t help it. I am one of them.”

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